Innovation Nation and other great books

I have borrowed the following list from John Kao’s blog, www.innovationation.org. John in turn reproduces the list from Business Week’s innovation section, run by Bruce Nussbaum. Bruce Nussbaum has selected John Kao’s book “Innovation Nation” as one of his recommended ten-best books on innovation.

John Kao is a fascinating speaker and a recognized thought-leader in the field of innovation. I will include more of his work and ideas here on upcoming UltraFuture blogs.

Below is the full list of innovation ‘must-reads’ from Newsweek:

1. The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger L. Martin.
2. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction by Thomas K. McCraw.
3. Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync? Seth Godin.
4. The Design of Future Things by Don Norman.
5. Innovation Nation by John Kao.
6. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.
7. The Future of Management by Gary Hamel.
8. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
9. The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda.
10. Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See, by Andrew Burroughs.

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Transhumanism and the Olympics

Maintaining a ‘level’ playing field in competitive sport becomes increasingly complex as technological advances provide athletes with superior training methods, equipment, supplements (dietary or otherwise) and enhancements. Equipment such as biomimetically designed swimming suits, for example, are monitored and regulated with increasing precision. In a landmark ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, 21 year old South African athlete Oscar Pistorius was approved to compete in Olympic Games against able-bodied athletes. The ‘Bladerunner’ (nicknamed after the carbon-fibre prosthetics he uses in place of his amputated lower legs) plans to compete in either the Beijing Olympics or London Olympics in 2012. As a result of the ruling, much debate has ensued around questions of fairness, equality and the ‘purity’ of sport.

While anabolic steroids and other doping techniques are widely deemed to be unfair in Olympic competition, we have unquestionably reached a turning point in prosthetic medical science when a ‘disabled’ athlete is perceived as having a potentially unfair advantage over able-bodied (read species-typical) competitors.

Developments in science and technology lead to products that alter the nature of competition in existing sports and often spawn the creation of new sports. These developments also influence social attitudes and values. Enhancements and modifications of athletes bodies and their equipment affect performance capabilities, competitive pressure and societal expectations.

Many modern internal and external enhancements of the human body go beyond the ’species-typical’. Whether undergoing plastic surgery aimed at improving physical attractiveness, or anabolic steroids aimed at improving physical size and power, these enhancements and their undeniable impact on performance lead to a culture of increasing demand and paradoxically enable cultures of both acceptance and rejection.

These improvements of the human body (structural, functional, abilities) bring us beyond our species-typical limits. This contributes to the development of new social concepts such as transhumanism, a concept based on the idea that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase - and the desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. The transhumanisation of ableism,which is the set of beliefs, processes and practices that perceive the improvement of human body abilities beyond typical Homo sapiens boundaries as essential to our continued evolution and even survival is another consequence.

While many argue that ‘unfair’ financial and technical advantages have long been a reality of Olympic competition, it is nonetheless understandable to feel some nostalgia for the noble notion of purity in amateur sport. However, a scenario where we strictly mandate a ‘pure’ Olympics only for species-typical, able-bodied athletes, for example, calls to mind scenes from The Chrysalids or the X-Men series of comics. The current trajectory of medical and technical developments (on the way to Kurzweils ‘Singularity’?) will undoubtedly see drastic and numerous improvements in prosthetics, nutrition, doping and even cybernetics. How do we monitor, regulate and decide which of these advancements is acceptable? In the X-Men stories, many ’species-typical’ (normal) humans exhibit fear and distrust of Homo superior (often used in reference to mutants), who are regarded by a number of scientists as the next step in human evolution and are thus widely viewed as a threat to human civilizations.

While Oscar Pistorius’s prosthetics were orginally used to replace his missing lower legs, voluntary augmentations or alterations may reasonably proliferate if world-class performance (and its rewards) are on the table. It is both fascinating and, admittedly, frightening to extrapolate from the case of Oscar Pistorius and imagine an UltraFuture where Homo superior athletes compete at levels far beyond the capabilities of todays able-bodied sports stars. Indeed, it is both fascinating and frightening to imagine a future where transhumanists, cyborgs and other supra-human entities walk the streets and live and work together with us in notable numbers.

What percentage of people around the world today have had cosmetic surgery? Have had re-constructive or use prosthetic limbs? Take drugs or supplements that improve their physical, emotional or mental performance? Utilize machines, electronics or other devices that give them a decisive advantage in improving their physical health or financial wealth?

How advanced and widespread will these technologies be in 30 years?

Footnotes
i. World Transhumanist Association, “The Transhumanist FAQ “ A General Introduction“ Version 2.1″, (2003) available at: http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/faq21/46/
ii. Ibid
iii. See: G Wolbring, “Glossary for the 21st Century”, International Center for Bioethics, Culture and Disability (2007) available at: http://www.bioethicsanddisability.org/glossary.htm; G Wolbring, “Why NBIC? Why human performace enchancment?”, (2008) 21 (1) Innovation; The European Journal of Social Science Research 25-40; “NBICS, other convergences, ableism and the culture of peace”, G Wolbring, Innovationwatch.com, 15 Apr 2007, available at: http://www.innovationwatch.com/choiceisyours/choiceisyours-2007-04-15.htm; G Wolbring, “New and Emerging Sciences and Technologies, Ableism, Transhumanism and Religion, Faith, Theology and Churches” (2007) 7 Madang; International Journal of Contextual Theology in East Asia, 79.

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A New Mantra for Creativity

Executives should apply the “Order of Magnitude” rule to any problem that demands a creative solution

by Bill Buxton

In 1992, having recognized that display technologies were going to evolve — fast — Bill Buxton and a team at the University of Toronto built the Active Desk, a precursor to today’s touch screens.

Let’s start with a basic question: What differentiates the professional designer or innovator from the person who has one great idea (no matter how profitable)? For me, the difference is the same as that between the musician with a string of successful recordings, and a one-hit wonder. Yes, the latter demonstrates an act of creativity combined with execution. But the former is like the Duracell bunny - the creativity keeps going and going and going.

There is something to be learned from the ability of such serial offenders to exercise repeatedly their creative skills on demand without waiting for divine inspiration. Despite a problem that is perhaps not that interesting, they can nevertheless manufacture all the inspiration needed to complete the task at hand every time. That is their job. That is what “professional” means to them.

So how do they do it? Let me say straight off, I would be a fool and lose all credibility if I suggested I knew, or that there was a simple single answer. On the other hand, I’m eager to share one technique I have resorted to on many occasions when I was up against the wall with “idea block.” It is something that I call the “Order of Magnitude” rule, which reads as follows:

If something changes by an order of magnitude along any meaningful dimension, it is no longer the same thing.

I like the name because its acronym, OOM, conjures up the prototypical Buddhist mantra, om. Let’s meditate on it a bit by going back to 1801 and the classroom of Franklin Pierce Nitt, the inventor of the blackboard.

Visual display size shown according to Order of Magnitude physical size changes, growth and investment.

Misses the Point

To understand why this is relevant, first ask yourself what preceded the blackboard. Eventually, you will realize, “The slate.” True enough. And equally true, the blackboard is just a big slate mounted on the wall. In the parlance of today, both use the same chip technology (calcium carbonate), have the same operating system and interface, and you can reuse the user manual! Technologically, there is no innovation here other than the manufacture of a big slate, and the challenge of mounting it on the wall.

But, while that is all true, it also misses the point that despite the lack of technological innovation, there is a plausible argument that the innovation of the blackboard has had more impact on classroom education than any innovation since, including cheap paper (which came in about the 1860s), the PC, and the Internet. The blackboard fundamentally changed the social and physical organization of classroom education, by better supporting teaching and demonstrating to the group, rather than the individual, and by enabling timely support material to be displayed in the visible periphery, while the students worked on their personal slates. And as something that supported a new type of “social network” in the class, it did so because of one or two OOM changes in this case, the dimensions of size and distance.

Now I am guessing that when I stated the OOM rule, you mentally enumerated a number of dimensions along which something could change. You came up with things like “faster,” “smaller,” “cheaper,” “more of them,” “easier to use,” etc. I also guess that “change in distance” was not one of them.

Sweet Spots

Therein lies another valuable lesson: One of the areas where you can leverage the OOM rule is through the creativity and insights that you bring to recognizing or determining nonobvious (but important) dimensions along which something known might change and how it might thereby be transformed.

And notice there is a multiple here. For sure, the rule applies even if there is an OOM change along only one dimension. But as our blackboard illustrates, some of the sweet spots emerge when one considers changes in two or more dimensions.

Despite coming from 1801, this blackboard example leads directly to one of the situations where I have used the OOM rule. Knowing some dramatic changes in display technologies were coming down the road, around 1992 I started asking myself questions like:

-What if screen real estate was essentially free (in the same sense as bandwidth has become)?

-What if we had large interactive displays on the walls everywhere we have whiteboards and corkboards today?

-Echoing the slate-blackboard transition, how will today’s tablet PC relate to a wall-sized stylus-driven display?

-What are the implications when public signage and advertising are based on interactive displays rather than paper or other traditional media?

You can add your own questions to the list. The point is that OOM changes in cost, size, location, number, interactivity, and the like will fundamentally change our relationship to information displays. These changes are at least as profound as those that resulted from the introduction of the blackboard into classrooms. Wall-sized posters on subway platforms are not going to be static or made from paper; they are going to be active. Projection technology is already used in some cities. What about movie posters or bus shelters? How will the impact be different in the home, in a room wallpapered with display technology vs. the office or design studio? How might your mobile phone be used to interact with such displays, so that they go beyond TV or a slide show?

Academy Award-Winning Insight

Having recognized that we were entering a period of transition in display technologies, the challenge was to find a way to gain some insights into the questions above. So at the University of Toronto in the early 1990s, we built something we called the Active Desk. This was an electronic drafting table with a three-foot flat display. You could draw on it with a digital stylus, and in one prototype application, use your other hand to hold and manipulate the graphical objects displayed on the surface. It was smoke and mirrors, but it worked.

What this did was to give us a huge head start in terms of understanding how interacting with a surface of this size was different from conventional displays. For example, pull-down menus did not work well. On the other hand, we refined a kind of gesture-based radial menu that did work with a stylus and large surface, which we called marking menus. What we also found was that these menus worked well on conventional systems as well, with their CRT displays and mouse controls, and gave up to 10 times improvement in menu selection performance.

When I became chief scientist of Alias Research in 1994, these menus became part of the signature user interface for all of our products, including the animation package, Maya, which won an Academy Award for scientific and technical achievement. By asking the right questions, and then pursuing a path to answer them, we not only gained early insights into where things were going, we were able to incorporate those insights into our existing products, thereby both reaping benefits in the short term and preparing a product line for the future. Fast-forwarding to the present, this work also became one of the stepping stones that led to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Surface.

A Meaningful Discussion

There are huge implications around all of these questions for dozens of businesses that likely don’t think of themselves as in the computer or high-tech business. The OOM rule isn’t going to answer any of them, but in providing a catalyst for asking the right questions, its value is indisputable.

So, when you find yourself staring at the wall, stymied by a problem that demands a creative solution that is eluding you, try a simple exercise. Brainstorm a list of dimensions that could in any way characterize that with which you are concerned. Then, before you start warping your problem up or down any single dimension, add one more attribute to each dimension, namely, the reason you think it is meaningful.

The ensuing discussion of what constitutes “meaningful” will almost certainly help you generate additional items for your list of dimensions. Then start exploring each—alone and in various combinations. The big challenge and opportunity here is in how insightful you are in recognizing the potential implications of such changes.

Not everyone can learn to be a world-class designer, no more than everyone could become a major league pitcher or a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be taught to improve your ability to throw a ball, or understand something about the interior working of the atom. So it is with creativity. There’s no magic formula for any of this, and the OOM rule is just one technique that one can add to one’s quiver. It’s not the full story. But it is a good start.

Bill Buxton is Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research and the author of Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Previously, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc.

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Weber “Faster One” - The world’s fastest street-legal sports car?

Via Trendhunter.com, here is the next vehicle that claims to be the world’s fastest street-legal sports car - the Weber Sportcars Faster One. Reportedly, the car can go from 0 - 62 mph in 2.7 seconds, 0 - 124 mph in just 6.6 seconds, and has a top speed said to be over 248 mph! That’s fast.

For around $1.5 million, you get a 900-horsepower / 774 lb-ft twin-supercharged V8 engine and a set of 12-piston, 15-inch ceramic brakes.

The Weber press release notes, “Favorable aerodynamic properties are absolutely elementary in order to attain a top speed of more than 400 km/h. The car body of the WEBER SPORTCARS faster one is 204 centimeters wide and 115 centimeters high. It is made entirely from ultra-light yet super-strong carbon fiber. State-of-the-art aerodynamics computer software and wind-tunnel testing were employed to trim the carbon-fiber shell for maximum directional stability at the highest speeds. The aerodynamic downforce it creates is surpassed only by purebred racecars that do not have to comply with any legal requirements, e.g. ground clearance, et al.”

Google Announces Friend Connect. NOW 2.0 has arrived…

May 12, 2008
Related Article: Social:Learn - Education moves towards 2.0

Previewing Google Friend Connect: Website owners can make any site social

Easily insert social features to make “any app, any site, any friends” a reality

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (May 12, 2008) “ Tonight at Campfire One at the Googleplex (http://code.google.com/campfire/), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) will announce a preview release of Google Friend Connect, a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors.

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social — and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening’s Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.

To illustrate, independent musician Ingrid Michaelson has added music features from iLike with Google Friend Connect and is now able to run the iLike OpenSocial application on her official website (www.ingridmichaelson.com). As a result, starting tonight, fans who visit Ingrid’s site can connect with their friends without having to leave the site. Visitors will be able to see comments by friends from their social networks, add music to their profiles, see who is attending concerts, and enjoy other features of the iLike application, all at Ingrid’s website. With Google Friend Connect, people will be able to enjoy their favorite features with their friends on any website across the web.

“We want to bring ourselves to every eyeball, not bring every eyeball to us,” said Hadi Partovi, President of iLike. “Friend Connect is a significant opportunity for iLike, artists, and fans. The iLike Artist Dashboard will be the first content-management system that allows artists not only to post their songs, concerts, and videos to every leading social network from one dashboard, but also to simultaneously manage the content on their own websites.”

Google Friend Connect has been developed to lower two barriers to the spread of social features across the web. First, many website owners want to add features that enable their visitors to do things with their friends, but the technology and resource hurdles have been too high. Second, people are tiring of needing to create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the web. Google Friend Connect offers a solution to both these issues.

“Google Friend Connect is about helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social,” said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google. “Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards — OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.”

For Site Owners: Traffic and User Engagement

Without requiring coding experience, Google Friend Connect gives site owners a way to attract and engage more people by giving visitors a way to connect with friends on their websites.

• Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring their friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their activities on those sites back into their social network, attracting even more visitors.
• Increase engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial applications provides more interesting content and richer social experiences.
• Less work: any site can have social components without hiring a programming team or becoming a social network.

Google Friend Connect is in a preview release, available tonight after Campfire One on a handful of whitelisted websites. All site owners interested in learning more about Google Friend Connect and signing up for the wait list can visit http://www.google.com/friendconnect/ starting tonight. In the weeks ahead we will be turning on more sites, adding more social applications, and integrating feedback from site owners and developers.

Google I/O
Learn more about Google Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and other social initiatives at Google I/O, a two-day developer gathering about building the next generation of web applications. It takes place May 28-29 at Moscone West, San Francisco. Register now for Google I/O at http://code.google.com/events/io/.

Conference Call Information
Google will host a conference call to discuss this announcement. The conference call will be held on Monday, May 12, 2008 at 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time (12:30 p.m. Eastern Time). To access the conference call, please dial +1 (800) 776-0087 within the United States and +1 (913) 312-1509 from international locations. Replays of both calls will be available until midnight Eastern Time, May 19, 2008 at +1 (888) 203-1112 domestically and +1 (719) 457-0820 internationally. The confirmation code for the replay of the call is 7571843.

About Google Inc.
Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.

7 Floors & 7 Stars Below Sea Level - Istanbul and Poseidon Underwater Hotels

This seven floor underwater hotel will give its guests a new view of the famous city of Istanbul. It is due to open in 2010, and will coincide with its Culture Capital of Europe nomination and lay down a gauntlet as a world capital of tourism. The hotel is the work of Tanriverdi Holding and have set aside a multi-million dollar budget to ensure the project is finished to 7 star standards. The underwater hotel trend emerged over a year with a project in Dubai. This new project shows two unique characteristics - it will be based in the city center and will go one floor further underwater. The underwater hotel is being built on the ruins of a historical 1930s tobacco factory and will have restaurants, exhibition halls, and rooms all with sea views.

It will be interesting to check-in and check-out the underwater hotel rooms and facilities, as local experts suggest that the underwater visibility of the Istanbul Bosphorus Strait (which is the body of water that links the Black Sea, to the north, with the Sea of Marmara, to the south) is about ten feet.

Poseidon is a $500 million complex marketed as the world’s first underwater hotel. The Poseidon Mystery Island will be a 1.1 million square foot complex submerged 40 feet into a 5,000 acre coral lagoon near Fiji. The project has been underway for some time now, but the big news is that the Fiji location has now been secured.

“When I was in high school, I was always writing letters to Jacques Cousteau and sketching underwater habitats,” Jones recalls. In 2000, he took the first step toward the real thing, offering a reward to whomever found the best location for his futureundersea playground. “I’ve got a lot of friends in the submersible business who are also scuba divers,” he says. “So I put the word out that if someone came up with the perfect spot, we’d pay them $10,000. A business associate and avid diver suggested a reef off the Bahamian island of Eleuthera and collected his reward.” But Jones eventually ran into trouble negotiating a price for the site with its American owners. After a year of fruitless back-and-forth, he decided to set his sights farther afield, on Fiji.

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Is There Life on Mars? Ask a Magnet.

 

May 5, 2008 / Written by: James Kling
Also see:
-EXO LIFE: A World Of Possibilities Gives Perspective On Life On Enceladus
-Spacecraft Finds Organic Matter at Saturn Moon

Between three and four billion years ago, Mars was a lot like Earth. Both planets are believed to have had surface water. Those similarities make it a prime candidate for extraterrestrial life. “The assumption is that if bacterial life emerged on Earth at that time, then why not on Mars?”says Soon Sam Kim, principal member of technical staff at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Mars may also have had a magnetic field much like the one on Earth. Kim believes that the presence of an ancient martian magnetic field could be the key to tracing signs of ancient bacterial life. He has developed methods to detect two forms of the mineral magnetite (Fe3O4) that could act as mineral signatures of bacterial life. One is produced by Earth bacteria to assist with spatial orientation. The other is a respiration byproduct generated by bacteria that use iron in their metabolism instead of oxygen.

Terrestrial bacteria have evolved to make magnetite crystals of a very precise size range: 35 to 60 nanometers in size (a human hair is about 50,000 nm thick). These crystals act as magnets that can help bacteria align themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field “ for example, to orient themselves in the direction of higher oxygen concentrations. Bacteria make this precise size range of magnetite because outside of this size range, a particle’s magnetic field points in more than one direction and is therefore useless as a navigational tool. On Earth, that distinct size range makes biogenic magnetite easily recognizable because non-biogenic minerals tend to occur in a haphazard range of sizes.

There is no shortage of iron oxides on Mars” oxidized iron is what gives the planet its distinctive red color. If bacteria evolved on Mars, Kim reasons that they may have used the martian magnetic field in a similar manner, and left behind telltale biogenic magnetite. Such a geologic record can last billions of years because magnetite crystals are quite stable.

Kim wants to use magnetite as the basis for a miniaturized detector that could be carried aboard future missions searching for signs of ancient life on Mars. His detector is based on ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy. FMR detects the unique internal magnetic fields of biogenic magnetite. It works because a particle’s internal field is directly related to its size and shape “and because biogenic magnetite crystals fall into a very precise size range, they have a distinctive FMR signature.

The spins of the particle’s electrons orient themselves

Read more

Travels in the Next Millennium

By Hans Christian Andersen (Translated by Greta Wolfe)Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) is Denmark’s most celebrated writer. His more popular tales include The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor’s New Clothes, and The Little Mermaid. This short story seems to be very prophetic, written in January, 1852, long before Jules Verne wrote ‘Around the World in 80 Days.’

This vision of the year 2850 seems to have already arrived.

A fanciful view of future airship travel, engraved by Britain’s Ordnance Survey Office in 1864.

Yes, in a thousand years they will be coming through the air, over the world’s seas! The young Americans visiting the old Europe. They will be coming to see the monuments and memorials here, the fading past, just as in our time we wander to south Asia’s crumbling splendors.

In a thousand years they’ll come! The Thames, Danube and Rhine still flow. Mont Blanc has its snowcap, the Northern lights still dance over the Nordic lands, but generation after generation has passed to dust, forgotten, like those who now slumber in Paradise.

“To Europe!” Cry the young Americans. “To our forefathers’ lands! Memories and fantasy’s lovely land” Europe!”

Airships coming. They are crowded with travelers, the pace is faster than by sea. The electromagnetic ropes under the seas have already telegraphed how big the air caravan is.

All must see Europe. It is Ireland’s coast that first appears, but the passengers are still asleep. They wish to be awakened first when they reach England. There they tread Europe’s sod in Shakespeare’s land” land of politics, industry’s birthplace, others call it.

A whole day is spent here. This is how much time the busy generation can spend in big England and Scotland.

The rush goes on - under the Channel tunnel to France, Charlemagne, Napoleon’s land. Moliere is mentioned, “the erudite talk about classic and romantic schools in the fourth renaissance” and celebrations are held for heroes, soldiers, and scientists of which our time knows not yet. They are born here in the heart of Europe - Paris.

The airship flies out over the land Columbus left, where Cortez was born, where Calderon sang drama in verse; lovely dark-eyed women still live and build in the flowering valleys. And in ancient songs you hear about El Cid and Alhambra.

Through the air, over the sea to Italy, where the old eternal Rome lay. It is obliterated, the countryside is barren, a desert. Of old Saint Peter’s Basilica they show a lonely standing wall, but one doubts its authenticity.

To Greece, to sleep one night in the luxury hotel high atop Mt. Olympus. Then one can say, “We have been there.” The chase goes on toward the Bosporus to rest a few hours and see the place where Byzantium was. Poor fishermen spread their nets here, where legend told of the Harem’s garden in Turkish times.

More great cities on the mighty Danube. Cities our age never knew. But here and there, places rich in memories, the future generations must see. There the air caravan dips and takes off again.

Down there lies Germany, once covered with the tightest nets of rails and canals. Country where Luther spoke, Goethe wrote, and where Mozart in his time wore music’s crown. Big names light up science and art, names we can’t recognize.

One day stay for Germany, and one day for the North, for Orsted’s and Linnaeus’ land, and Norway. The old heroes and the young Northmen’s land. Iceland is seen on the return trip. Geysers no longer spout, Hekla is closed. But the strong cliff-island still lies in the turbulent sea - a perpetual monument to the sagas.

“There is so much to see in Europe!” say the young Americans, “and we have seen it in eight days. And it is possible, as the famous traveler (a name is mentioned, that belongs to their age) has shown in his famous book “Europe, Seen in Eight Days.”

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Backing greens with greenbacks

May 8th 2008
From The Economist print edition

It takes patience and guts to invest in the environment

Illustration by Satoshi Kambayashi

AL GORE does not just make films about climate change. His fund-management firm, Generation Investment Management, has just raised $683m for a ‘climate solutions’ fund. The hope is that environmental principles and shrewd investing can produce strong profits.

But could the combination of soapbox movies and warm air form a bubble instead? Certainly, the valuations that have been attached to some green shares have brought back memories of the dotcom era. As yet, though, the sector has not created the household names, the Netscapes and the eBays, that were seen as ‘must buys’ for your average day trader.

Indeed, so far this year, environmental investors must be feeling green with nausea. The Impax ET50 index of leading environmental shares peaked at 286 at the end of 2007 and then plunged by nearly a quarter in January; even after a recovery, it is still down 10% on the year.

If events in the industry do resemble those of the late 1990s, the better analogy may be telecoms, not dotcoms. Most green companies are not a matter of a couple of geeks and a website. Just as telecom companies laid down billions of dollars worth of fibre-optic cables, environmental companies require large amounts of capital - for building a wind farm or a tidal barrage - or the patience to invest in new technologies, such as cellulosic ethanol or thin-film solar panels.

This means that the shares are likely to be volatile. The returns are highly uncertain, because the big profits (if any) are many years away. News events such as technological breakthroughs or changes in government policy will have a much bigger impact on valuations.

Two years ago, for example, biofuels were favoured investments because of the Bush administration’s drive for energy independence, and its provision of subsidies for ethanol production. But doubts about the green credentials of biofuel use, and the knock-on effects on food prices, have caused investors to become disillusioned. Hopes are now pinned on the ’second generation’ of biofuels that will be created from non-food crops grown on marginal land, but the technology is years away from perfection.

It is both good and bad that there are so many competing solutions to the problem of climate change. When one technology falls out of favour, there is always another to take its place. Last year, much of the action was in solar; shares in First Solar, a company backed by the Walton family of Wal-Mart fame, rose nearly 800%. But solar shares have come off the boil and enthusiasm has switched back to wind; Iberdrola Renovables, a spin-off from the Spanish utility, raised €4.5 billion ($6.6 billion) in a float at the end of last year.

The danger is that a lot of money may be wasted as investors chase technologies that turn out, in the long run, to be too costly or impractical. For every observer who thinks the answer lies in renewable energy, there is another who believes in carbon capture. As Bruce Jenkyn-Jones of Impax, an environmental-finance group, says: “The key in this field is not to get too excited about anything.”

As a way of keeping their pulses steady, some investors have favoured more prosaic businesses, such as energy efficiency. But even these shares have taken a hit in recent months because of their links to the moribund construction industry; new houses may contain more insulation these days, but at the moment fewer of them are being built.

That example encapsulates the problem. Picking the winners in the environmental industry is astonishingly difficult. The chances are that, just as in many other fields, the pioneers will go bust and a second or third wave of companies will reap the profits.

Generation, which Mr Gore chairs, is trying to look ahead and has linked up with Kleiner Perkins, a venture-capital group, to help it spot the coming stars. Colin le Duc, the head of research at Generation, picks out three areas of interest; smart metering of users that allows utilities to adjust prices at different times of the day; solar thermal plants that use mirrors to heat water; and biomass as a stock for purposes other than fuel - such as turning wood into plastic.

Of course, no one knows whether those ideas will be more successful than anything else. When it comes to green investing, there is no black and white. Perhaps the best hope for the industry is that the oil price remains stubbornly high. While it does, alternative energy sources will look more affordable and investors will be willing to stump up the cash to develop the technologies involved. But they will need strong nerves and the patience to wait for a long time.

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NASA’s 50th Anniversary Lecture By Professor Stephen Hawking

“Why We Should Go Into Space” - NASA’s 50th Anniversary Lecture Series
Keynote Speakers: STEPHEN HAWKING, Professor, University of Cambridge LUCY HAWKING, Journalist and Novelist
Moderated by JOHN LOGSDON, Director, Space Policy Institute, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University

DR. HAWKING: Why we should go into space. What is that justification for spending all that effort and money on getting a few lumps of moon rock? Aren’t there better causes here on Earth?

In a way, the situation was like that in Europe before 1492. People might well have argued that it was a waste of money to send Columbus on a wild goose chase. Yet, the discovery of the new world made a profound difference to the old. Just think, we wouldn’t have had a

Big Mac or a KFC.

[Laughter.]

DR. HAWKING: Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect. It will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all.

It won’t solve any of our immediate problems on Planet Earth, but it will give us a new perspective on them and cause us to look outwards and inwards. Hopefully, it would unite us to face a common challenge.

This would be a long-term strategy, and by long term, I mean hundreds or even thousands of years. We could have a base on the Moon within 30 years or reach Mars in 50 years and explore the moons of the outer planets in 200 years. By “reach,” I mean with man or, should I say, person space flight.

We have already driven Rover and landed a probe on Titan, a moon of Saturn, but if one is considering the future of the human race, we have to go there ourselves.

Going into space won’t be cheap, but it will take only a small proportion of world resources. NASA’s budget has remained roughly constant in real terms since the time

of the Apollo landings, but it has decreased from .3 percent of U.S. GDP in 1970 to .12 percent now.

Even if we were to increase the international budget 20 times to make a serious effort to go into space, it would only be a small fraction of world GDP.

There will be those who argue that it would be better to spend our money solving the problems of this planet, like climate change and pollution, rather than wasting it on a possibly fruitless search for a new planet.

I am not denying the importance of fighting climate change and global warming, but we can do that and still spare a quarter of a percent of world GDP for space. Isn’t our future worth a quarter of percent?

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